As part of the push to employ reusable launch
vehicles to reduce the high cost of putting satellites into orbit, Northrop
Grumman is teaming with two aerospace innovators to design and flight test a
booster that can recover on a runway like an airplane after each launch
mission. Northrop is working with Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites and Virgin
Galactic, which combined to produce an airplane that made a non-stop,
globe-circling flight, and a mothership for a reusable space ship, on the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s XS-1 Experimental Spaceplane program.
A Northrop release
said its XS-1 concept pairs the reusable booster with an expendable upper stage
rocket to lift a 3,000-pound spacecraft into low earth orbit. The team is
working on a 13-month, $3.9 million DARPA contract. A key program goal is to be
able to fly 10 space launch missions in 10 days using minimal ground crew and
infrastructure. Reusable launch vehicles could reduce the cost of orbiting
satellites by a factor of 10 and allow quicker replacement of crucial
spacecraft. The reusable launcher also could support testing of a new
generation of hypersonic aircraft, states the release.